An investigation of the possibility of teaching heat transfer to vocational school students, by using their own aptitude in setting-up and performing relevant experiments utilising sensors and ICT

Tsihouridis Ch.1, Vavougios D.* 1, and Ioannidis G. S. 2
1: Department of Special Education, University of Thessaly, Greece: hatsihour@uth.gr, dvavou@uth.gr .
2: The Science Laboratory, School of Education, University of Patras, Greece: gsioanni@upatras.gr

The present study aims to investigate the extent to which Technical Vocational School students when actively involved in creating, setting-up, and using experiments utilizing sensors, in combination with an appropriate software, improve their comprehension concerning heat transfer phenomena, in comparison to those students, who simply experimented using the same setup. A number of 122 students of the mechanical sector in a Technical Vocational School participated in the research. These were split into an experimental group of 64, which also took part in the creation and the setting-up of the school-experiment and another group of 58 of student-users, which constituted the control group. Both questionnaires and personal interviews were used to collect the research-data. Ensuing data analysis indicates that, when the questions are relevant to the creation of the experimental setup, the experimental group exhibits a higher percentage of correct or partly correct answers than those of the control group, whereas any differences observed on the rest of the questions seems to be within the limits of the total research-errors